Ice house
Started: 2023-04-15 12:14:02
Submitted: 2023-04-15 16:44:10
Visibility: World-readable
Breakfast at a legendary restaurant, a canal museum, a bank museum, and a bunker museum
On Tuesday, the 4th of April, we headed across zone 1 in central London to eat breakfast at Dishoom in King's Cross. (Breakfast at Dishoom (or, arguably, by the time we arrived, it was more brunch-time) is a reliable way to beat the legendary queue, and the breakfast menu is unique and just as good as the dinner menu.)
From South Kensington, the obvious route to King's Cross is the Piccadilly line, but when we reached the deep-level tube platforms the arrivals board did not show an actual time for any of the future trains, and the announcements in the station indicated that the line was experiencing signal failures and would be delayed. We headed back upstairs to the subsurface line platforms (below grade level in South Kensington, but still open to the sky above, a legacy of the ventilation required by the steam trains that ran on these lines in the 19th century) and caught the District Line eastbound to Victoria, then transferred to the Victoria Line and rode it the rest of the way to King's Cross.
We made our way through the maze that is King's Cross underground station and exited near the end of the Pancras Square infill development, the site of the Google office buildings where I spent most of my time when I visited my counterpart SRE teams in London. We walked between Pancras Square and the still-under-construction Google "landscraper". This building was a hole in the ground when I visited in 2018 and had begun to climb above ground level in 2019. It finally topped out last year, and it's still being fitted out for Google's new London headquarters, because Google is one of the tech companies that hasn't learned as many lessons about remote work as it should have.
We crossed the Regent's Canal into the Coal Drop Yards, an industrial reuse redevelopment with boutique shops and restaurants in old brick buildings. We found Dishoom and sat at the low lounge table next to the front door, which featured deeply-reclined seats and was only slightly awkward to lean forward and eat. The chai (and its refills) was delicious and the toast with egg and cheese and chilies from the breakfast menu was good. I did not come all the way to London just to eat at Dishoom, but while I was here I wanted to make the most of it.
By the time we finished eating breakfast it was almost noon. We walked back across Regents Canal, past the north end of the Landscraper, and around a couple of corners to the Canal Museum, located on a small basin on the canal. The building was built as an ice warehouse, and the ground floor of the museum talked about the building's history in an age when ice was harvested in Norway, shipped across the North Sea, transferred to barges to travel up the canal, and stored in the large underground ice pits to be hoisted out one block at a time and delivered (by horse cart) around London for refrigeration.
The museum had one of the ice pits open, and it's a little hard to tell from this picture, but this was just a big hole in the ground under the concrete floor, surrounded by a fence so we could look into the pit.
Upstairs was a gallery dedicated to the history of canals and canal-building across Britain, with a bunch of maps showing the extent of the canal system across the island, and a detail of the canal system around London, augmenting the rivers Thames and Lea to provide water-based transportation for industry. This was England's super-highway of its day, before being taken over by the railroads; but small-scale canal shipping persisted into the 1960s until a winter freeze shut down the network and drove the live-aboard narrowboat operators out of business.
The museum had an example of a narrowboat on the ground floor: a self-propelled canal boat with a modest cargo capacity for bulk cargo (this example cut off the end of the cargo hold, but it looked like it was maybe 10 meters long, and no wider and deeper than a shipping container or the back of a road lorry) with a tiny cabin for the boatman and his family to live aboard as they carried cargo around the waterways.
Canal barges were originally pulled by horses on the narrow tow-paths next to the canal, but by the twentieth century tractors began to replace horses. The museum had an example Wickham diesel tractor used to pull canal barges, and the display encouraged visitors to climb onto the tractor for a photo op in the driver's seat, so Julian obliged.
The museum was modest in size but gave an interesting window into an earlier era. We exited via the gift shop, where Kiesa bought several books (some of which ended up in my bag, which expanded to accommodate our shopping).
We headed back to King's Cross underground station, passing by the dramatic front of the nineteenth century cathedral to steam, built out of brick with graceful arches matching the arched roof above the train platforms. We found the Transport for London visitor's centre in the underground station and picked up the photo cards that I had ordered for the kids to give them their official discounts on the Tube and any other transit we might take in the city. I had to order the card 28 days in advance, and I could only pick it up at a TfL visitor's centre. The visitor's centre at Heathrow closed before we landed on Saturday, and they were all closed on Sunday and Monday, so the first chance we had to pick up the card was Tuesday. (When we landed at Heathrow, I got a "young visitor's discount" on an Oyster card for Calvin, which gave a 50% discount off the adult fare, but the discount offered on the official photo card was better; but it probably didn't make up for the £15 fee to get the card in the first place.)
Actually picking up the cards was fast and easy; the guy at the desk double-checked the birthdays on the cards versus the birthdays in their passports to confirm that we were giving the right discount to the right kids, and we got the Oyster transit cards for the kids, each printed with their own passport photos.
I put £10 on Calvin's card, and £5 on Julian's card. I wasn't sure if Julian really needed money on his card, since his Tube rides are all free, but I worried that the turnstiles might not let him in or out if there was no value on the card at all. Up until we got the photo card, Julian had been tailgating with me through the turnstiles (usually at the extra-width fare gate intended for people with luggage or disabilities or children), but once we got the card Julian preferred to tap in and tap out himself. (I didn't trust him to hold onto the card himself, so I kept his card in my pocket until we were approaching the fare gates on the way in or the way out, then handed it to him to pass through the gates and collected the card on the other end.)
With our cards in hand we took the Northern line (Bank branch) south to Bank station, arriving on the newly-expanded Northern line platforms at the station. As we disembarked I could see how the old platforms had been expanded by a brand-new platform in a new tunnel, with the old southbound tracks and platform replaced by a corridor. From the new platforms we exited via the brand-new Cannon Street entrance, which was great except that we actually wanted to go to the Bank of England so I had to figure out where we were and where King William Street was so that we could get to the bank that gave the station its name.
We walked around the back of the Bank of England to the bank's own museum on Bartholomew Lane. After a security check (this one featuring an actual x-ray machine and metal detector, not just a cursory glance inside my bag) we stepped into a room recreating the trading room of the original eighteenth century Bank of England building, decorated in a plain monochromatic style that highlighted the size of the open space when it was first built. Displays around the side of the gallery talked about the history of the bank, and the history of the bank building itself, including the complete reconstruction of the building to expand its office space in the early twentieth century (a requirement brought on to finance the first world war), preserving only the original facade of the earlier building. One of the exhibits was a safe that required looking around the signs on the exhibits to determine the combination (of the form "when was the first bank building built?" with the answer to that question giving a number to be used in the combination). Calvin helped open the safe and both Calvin and Julian took one of the little slips of paper inside to the information desk for a prize. The prize turned out to be a Bank of England pen, which Calvin seemed adequately amused by but Julian was not impressed.
The rest of the museum included the original royal charter of the Bank of England from 1694, bearing the royal seal of William and Mary.
Some of the displays traced the evolution of paper money; one display case had a million-pound note, which reminded me of the current ridiculous American discourse around the debt ceiling and the trillion-dollar coin. I mentioned this to Calvin and then had to explain the debt ceiling and the coin and I'm not sure I did it justice because the whole conversation is just so ridiculous.
The museum added comments to its displays discussing slavery and the bank, including a series of displays inviting visitors to consider the legacy of slavery today.
The museum had on display a real gold bar on display, in a clear plastic display case with a hand-sized hole in the side so we could reach inside and pick up the bar, as far as we could move it within the one-centimeter gap that it was allowed to move in its cage. I think they told us it was a 20 kg bar, so I could pick it up, though it was awkward within the security constraints of the display.
We departed the museum to head in search of a snack to serve as lunch, even though by that point it was the middle of the afternoon. Kiesa wanted to try scones with official English clotted cream and decided a reasonable place to do so would be the Gail's chain of bakeries. There were Gail's bakeries all over London, but none in the City itself, so we caught the Waterloo and City line from Bank to Waterloo (the first time we traveled south of the Thames on this trip) and found the Gail's bakery on the ground floor of an office building outside the station, a block from the London Eye. By the time we got there, though, they were just about out of scones (they had only one plain scone left), so we ate that one plus other baked goods for our late lunch.
The final thing I wanted to see was the Churchill War Rooms, which was supposed to be a breezy ten-minute walk across the Westminster Bridge. This proved to be anything but; as we approached the bridge the crowds intensified, to the point where the bridge was standing-room-only as huge crowds of tourists jostled in every direction across the pedestrian pavement on the side of the bridge. The crowding intensified around actual people doing actual shell games on the bridge, with people crowded around to watch the spectacle. (I didn't realize that this was a real thing that real people actually did; I thought it was just a historic scam because everyone already knew that it was obviously a scam intended to separate marks from their money. But I guess there's a sucker born every minute, or maybe the people watching were just trying to figure out how it was a scam before they too were separated from their money.)
The crowding wasn't much better on the opposite bank of the bridge as we jostled past the Houses of Parliament and the clocktower that everyone calls "Big Ben". The crowds finally began to abate after we crossed Parliament Street and passed Parliament Square. Then we got to the museum and found a huge queue outside, with less than two hours to go before they closed at 18:00. This was one of the museums that took advance ticket reservations, but I didn't think I could actually book a timed ticket because I didn't know when we would get there (or if we'd decide to do something else instead). Kiesa and Julian headed off to find a trash can to discard the take-away cup Julian had been carrying from Gail's, and Calvin and I waited in the queue.
Calvin and I reached the front of the walk-up queue before Kiesa and Julian returned. We entered the museum, climbed down the steps, and picked up audio guides to head into the offices that had been built in the basement of the government ministry buildings and secured against bombings during the second world war. Calvin thought this was fascinating (as I expected he would); I spent much of my time at the museum wondering about the portrayal of British nationalism in the exhibits and the interaction between the celebration of the British victory in the second world war (clearly shown here, as well as Bletchley Park, and other museums we visited) and the current conservative government. (Then we got to the exhibit all about Winston Churchill holding him up as the greatest of all the Great Men.)
Kiesa and Julian caught up with us in the Churchill exhibit. This was approximately half-way through the cabinet war rooms; we watched the time to try to figure out how much time we should spend in the rest of the museum and hurried up to see the Map Room, the information center of the offices, on the far end of the maze of passages all through the basement bunker.
We emerged from the bunker right as the museum was closing at 18:00, then headed across the street to St. James' Park (past a statue of Earl Mountbatten mostly hidden in a field of scaffolding, watched over by guards with machine pistols because this was the back entry to Number Ten Downing Street). We sat in the grass in the evening sun and decided to go to Mali Vegan Thai for supper. Eager to avoid the crowds around Westminster we walked to Piccadilly Square and caught the Piccadilly Line to Earl's Court, then found the restaurant just outside the station. We arrived without a reservation, and I watched as the the host tried to Tetris us into the table schedule before offering us a table for one hour. This proved to be plenty of time to eat the good vegan Thai food and they even offered us the check in a reasonable amount of time.
I took a few more pictures than I posted above; you can see them all at Photos on 2023-04-04.
